Chapter Six: A Father's Love
Criss-Cross got very little sleep that night. Between the tears, and her reeling mind with the decision that loomed over her head. It was no surprise to her when sunrise came only fifteen minutes after she had fallen asleep out of pure exhaustion. As soon as the sun peaked through, she was up and out of bed, her hat shoved firmly down over her puffy, red eyes. She hurried through the bathroom, not seeing any of the others awake, and went straight down to the kitchen, where she stuff a chunk of old bread into her pocket, and took off for the distribution office.
She didn't want to see any one else besides those she had to see, for if they didn't even look that hard, they could tell that she'd been crying. She hit the office right as it opened, got her daily 200 papes, and hit the streets to sell, her thoughts lost in New York...
At six years-old Katherine Conlon -who had been nicknamed Kat because she always seemed to land on her feet, and plus is was a shortened form of her name- was just as tough as all the other newsies. She could fight, she could shoot her slingshot, and most of all, she could sell. Frisk, who had become like an older sister to her, had noticed early on that the girl had a hot temper, but at the same time an inexplicable charm. Kat was an amazing seller, always managing to tell close to the truth, yet sell a hundred papes. It had always surprised Frisk how easily the girl could sell the smaller papers too. It wasn't just the World and the Journal that Kat sold, but it was all the papers. She'd sell the Times, the Sun, and the Tribune. It always made Frisk proud to sell by the smaller girl's side.
It was late November of 1892 when the bull that would tear apart their newsie family showed up at the door of the Queens Lodging House. He was asking looking for a girl by the last name of Conlon, and everyone immediately knew he meant Kat. Before they could find out why, he'd dragged her out the door and shoved her into the back of a carriage, throwing in a skirt, blouse, and cape after her. He yelled at her to change into them or face jail, and then hopped up onto the driver's seat of the carriage. All the Queens kids looked on with confusion as he drove off south with Kat in the back of the carriage.
The bull had been asigned the job of taking Kat to the house of her father, a semi-wealthy man who lived in Brooklyn. Kat remembered that Harold Conlon, a worker in a factory in Queens, had befriended her mother, a young woman by the name of Sarah Watson, when h was 19. Sarah had been 15 at the time, and completely infatuated with him. The two had courted for 2 years, and when Harold had turned 19, he had gotten Sarah to do the unthinkable with him. Convinced that the two would one day marry, she had spent a night with him, and, to her great misfortune, it had resulted in her becoming pregnant.
Sarah's family had disowned her, and Harold had run off, back to his home in Brooklyn, leaving Sarah to face the world alone. Seventeen and pregnant, Sarah was shunned by society, and so her baby, a girl whom she named Katherine, was born in a back alley in Queens.
Kat had always thought that was the funny thing about her life. She had been born on the streets, and, save for a brief 2 years in an apartment she had spent her life on the streets, an improper place for a young lady to spend her time.
And so it was with great irony that she found herself, dressed in a skirt and cape (the like of which she had not worn in three years), standing on the doorstep of her father's house. The bull had knocked on the door and then just left, not even waiting for her father to answer. After a few minutes, the door finally came open, and Kat looked sadly upon the face of a father who had first deserted her, and then, six years later, decided to welcome her into his home, though she didn't yet know why...
Criss-Cross shook her heard in anger, remembering her father's house. There she had spent the better part of both her sixth and seventh years as little better than a slave in a household that was supposed to be loving. She'd always wondered why a man who had left her before she was born would suddenly become interested in his child, but she had later found out why. Perhaps if he had never sent for her, she would never be standing in the middle of a pint-size town in the west. Sighing, Criss-Cross finally realized she'd subconsciously come to a decision about New York, and so she turned to selling her papes, her vigor and strength renewed.